Unless they have an infant or toddler, many Vermonters might be surprised to learn that there is a looming child care crisis in the state.
Families seeking affordable, quality care for young children are finding it difficult to impossible to place them due to cost, quality concerns and capacity.
In response, Gov. Peter Shumlin in June formed a Blue Ribbon Commission on Financing High Quality, Affordable Child Care. The 17 members of the commission held their first meeting at the Statehouse last week. They heard the stories of parents who are struggling to find high quality child care in Vermont.
Ellen Baier was barely pregnant when she began applying for a placement among the few South Burlington area child care centers that she felt offered “good” care.
“There is such tight competition for spots,” she said.
She would need care as soon as her maternity leave ended and the center would need to be close enough to her office so that she could nurse. “There were only two or three places I was willing to consider,” she said.
Baier said she has more options than a lot of other parents because she lives in an urban area, but it was still difficult to find a center that offered infant care near her workplace.
She also knew she would be spending a lot of time away from her baby in order to keep her job, and that’s why it was so important for her to find the right place.
“I’m not a workaholic. I just work a normal job but that is 10 hours a day,” Baier said.
Quality for Baier meant that the staff are paid well and had degrees in early childhood education. She wanted a curriculum and discipline policy that matched her values and was seeking an environment that offered age appropriate stimulation.
Four months into her pregnancy, Baier found out she was 93rd on the wait list of the center that she preferred. She had to take her infant daughter to a less desirable center for her first month in care.
Baier said her daughter is now a toddler, and about half of her salary is spent on child care costs.
“I can’t have a second kid until this kid is out of day care or I would have to stop working and then we wouldn’t have health insurance,” Baier said.
Baier says the state needs to spend more money on support for child care.
“This is really important to me,” Baier said. “The amount of money that you put into early childhood education, day care and preschool impacts the investments you have to make for that person for the rest of their life.”
The average cost for child care for a family of four with working parents in Vermont is $1,128 a month in rural areas and $1,258 a month in urban areas, according to the Joint Fiscal Office.
Julie Coffey, executive director of Building Bright Futures, an early childhood advisory council, said higher quality child care is more expensive. “And it is simply not affordable for our poorest in the state of Vermont,” Coffey said.
Capacity is another issue. Vermont has more than 26,000 children under age 6 living in households with both parents working, according to a recent census. (See page 18.)
As of 2013, Vermont’s licensed child care – including home care — providers had capacity for 27,500 children.
“At first glance, we have the capacity you would think to match the children in need with the supply,” explained Coffey. “But because of the overwhelming research which calls for high quality – and that is the game changer in a child’s life – we know we don’t have an adequate supply for the demand.”
Economic effects
Nearly 70 percent of Vermont children live in families with two working parents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Robyn Freedner-Maguire, campaign director for Let’s Grow Kids, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness of early childhood issues, said that like Ellen Baier many parents are making difficult choices in an attempt to piece together child care.
Many local businesses are also dependent on the available child care system to support employees.
“The challenge for the Blue Ribbon Commission is to listen to these stories and figure out what some of the solutions might be to afford high quality child care in the state,” Freedner-Maguire said.
The commission is expected to identify quality indicators for child care programs and make recommendations to support affordable, quality child care in Vermont. It will issue a report by Nov. 1, 2016. The panel is made up of the secretaries of Vermont’s agencies of Education, Administration and Human Services and a cross-section of policymakers, child care providers, parents and business representatives.
The relationship between earning power and access to high quality care is one of the biggest issues the commission hopes to address.
At last week’s meeting, the commission members – some of whom shared their own experiences with child care – were provided with background information and data on the current state of early education and child care in Vermont.
“The data the commissioners saw today paints a picture of a state where people are forced into tough choices that pit what’s best for their children against what’s best for their livelihood, or against their ability to pay their bills,” Freedner-Maguire said.
Coffey, of Bright Futures, says the poorest of the poor are unable to access high quality child care for infants at a time when the brain is developing at a rapid rate and the child is most vulnerable to toxic stress. “It’s a vicious cycle and it isn’t fair,” she said.
The state’s paltry reimbursements provided to poor families are outdated and haven’t kept pace with the market value of child care today in Vermont, Coffey says. Part of the commission’s job will be to find out if there is any public appetite for public financing.
“The subsidies are inadequate and disincentivize providers to work with poor children,” Coffey said. “In a way we are disincentivizing families that need that high quality care the most. They are in many cases unable to access high quality child care because there are so few of them and then the providers are disincentivized to take in these vulnerable children.”
The biggest challenge to providing affordable quality care from the provider’s perspective is needing to pay good wages and still keep tuition low enough for families to afford.
At the Winston Prouty Center for Child Development, where Chloe Learey, a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission and a child care provider in Brattleboro, is the executive director, tuition is set around $10,000 a year per child for full-time care but the actual cost to her is closer to $13,000 per child.
Learey says the center requires the lead teacher to have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and gives preference to candidates with a master’s degree.
“I’m not charging parents what it would really cost,” Learey said. “As a provider, I feel like we are subsidizing it.”
Learey tries to pay her staff $12 an hour. She would like to see the commission explore ways to “close the gap for providers so it is more sustainable.” She said she hopes the commission will highlight the need to professionalize early childhood education workers and pay them higher wages.
Infant care is particularly challenging. The Prouty center doesn’t currently offer infant care because it is expensive to provide and needs to be balanced with other programs. But Prouty will offer infant care next summer, and pregnant women are already asking for slots. “I could fill a whole classroom at this point,” Learey said. “It’s not a good problem for a community or a state to have.”
Prouty is a nationally accredited day care provider, according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). It also has a five-star rating from the Step Ahead Recognition System, which recognizes childcare centers that set high standards.
Getting a proper start
Nearly 90 percent of the brain is developed by age 5, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Learey summed up the urgency this way: “We better not wait until kindergarten then.”
A recent report by the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy, “Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation,” found that early learning sets the foundation for children’s health, development and later learning.
“The science of child development and early learning makes clear the importance and complexity of working with young children from infancy through the early elementary years, or birth through age 8,” according to the report.
The report calls for aligning teacher competencies with early learning science. Ultimately, it creates a springboard to an “elevated, well-compensated early childhood profession” that can be held responsible for offering high quality early learning, according to NAEYC.
